


The Inevitability of Ineffability

by NoxNoctua



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Break Up, Sad, Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:55:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24442435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoxNoctua/pseuds/NoxNoctua
Summary: Not everything is meant to be. Not everyone is meant to be in our life forever. There are no promises to anything and Aziraphale is still reckoning with that as he sits on the Amalfi coast, thinking back to what could have been.--Aziraphale and Crowley have broken up in this piece. I wrote this to deal with some things. I hope for some people dealing with similar loss can find some comfort or catharsis in this.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19





	The Inevitability of Ineffability

**Author's Note:**

> As mentioned in the summary, I wrote this to deal with some personal things. But I also wanted to give a voice to this potential side of their story.
> 
> In my heart, they always have a happy ending. But real life isn't that way.
> 
> This piece is dedicated to all those angels without demons, all those demons without angels, and everyone else who has lost or is losing something precious to them.
> 
> Thank you to LeilaKalomi for beta'ing.

Aziraphale stares out at the Tyrrhenian Sea. Behind him, the Amalfi coast stretches out in a jagged line of rocky hills, blanketed in a coat of emerald green. The sky is clear and bright and blue and the sun hangs high, just past zenith. There is a gentle breeze off the water, cooling a fine beading of sweat along Aziraphale’s hairline. It is warm, harsh under the full brunt of the sun, but inviting in the shade.

He has been here for some many months and the current time of year does not escape him unnoticed.

It is July. By the end of August, it will have been one year since the end of the world had been averted. Since he’d donned the skin of a demon, fooled all of Heaven and Hell, and dined with his best friend at one of his favorite restaurants.

He sits back in his rocking chair, uses the weight of his own body to gently coax it into a sway. His hands curl over the ends of the arms and he realizes his nails have gotten long when they scrape against the weather worn wood.

There is a gentle chuckle that escapes his chest, puffs past straight white teeth in a ghost of mirth.

Ghosts.

He is surrounded by so many these days, he muses to himself. They take the shape of memories, little picture shows he replays in his mind when the grief is its strongest. Despite being an ethereal being, his corporeal form is still prone to the same follies as his human companions, for good and for bad. He’s always been good at lying to himself, living in a state of denial, and his corporeal brain did not fail him in the way it repeated, “This isn’t real. It’s not happening. There is something you can do, something you haven’t tried yet, to change things. Make it better. You can fix this. This isn’t real.”

The time of year does not escape him. His thin lips pull into a self-pitying smile, tension builds behind his eyes.

No. Not that this time. No more crying, he tells himself, and blinks back the tears, swallows down the strain in his throat.

There is the woosh of wind through leaves as it sweeps along the hillside and Aziraphale closes his eyes against the comforting caress of it. 

Crowley would have loved it here, he muses. Loved the sun, the water, the breeze, the serenity.

Tears gather at the corner of his eyes anyways, despite his forbidding them to do so. Trying to blink them back is a fruitless effort, it only opens a gate, allows them to demand acknowledgement as they slide down his face, curl under his chin and fall into the collar of his shirt.

He grits his teeth against the sudden swelling of anguish in his chest. It wants to speak, to be known, to not be ignored or denied, and it shatters through him and out in a choked, pathetic sound.

I am pathetic, he thinks to himself. How much time has to pass before I can stop crying?

Apparently more, he concludes bitterly. 

The picture shows play again.

Last year. The end of summer. London. The Ritz.

Aziraphale is chattering along happily about whatever it is that crosses his mind, always chasing some errant thread of interest.

Crowley is listening, happily it seems. He wears that gentle, humoring smile that he always does when the angel carries on.

That smile has never gone unnoticed by Aziraphale. Quite the opposite. He relishes it, feeds off it. Every time he sees it is like a hit of dopamine straight to the brain. If a customer had fouled his mood, Crowley’s gentle smile immediately eased his tension.

His friend. His best friend.

A confidant.

Someone he can share every thought with, free of judgment (maybe not ridicule, but that was the choreography of their friendship.)

It was such a relief from the oppression of Heaven. 

Aziraphale hadn’t realized it until he was no longer in Heaven’s formal ranks. Of course, there were a lot of things he hadn’t realized until it was too late. He hadn’t realized how stupid he’d been, how cruel he’d been.

After The Ritz, they’d both teetered back to the bookshop. (Another practiced part of their friendship. Each had the script memorized: “Out to dinner?” “Back to your’s now, then?” “If you don’t mind, I’ll just sleep on the couch and be out by morning.”)

Crowley had taken his rightful place on the sofa and Aziraphale had sat across from him in his square desk-chair. Scotch was the continuation of their evening. Crowley had downed his first glass in one gulp, swung his legs up into the air, and let them fall cross-ankle onto the arm of the sofa.

“So angel, what now? We’ve got eternity, you and I. Do anythin’ we like, really. What’ll it be?” He had said it with that cocksure half-grin of his, both eyebrows raised.

Aziraphale thumbed the geometric shapes cut into the wall of his glass. He could feel a heat creeping up from beneath his collar, crawling up his neck and to his ears. It made his throat tight, so he swallowed thickly to open it up.

“Well. I thought. You and I, that is. You would say. Ah.” His pulse was frantic. His mind reeled. Was he really doing this? Trying to finally bridge that last gap?

Crowley had watched him closely, his playful grin falling into something more serious. His eyebrows were still raised but they were now knitted together in a look of concern and Aziraphale couldn’t really understand why that was the expression he’d been wearing. But he looked attentive, had leaned in with his feet planted firmly on the carpet.

“You  _ and I? _ What do you…mean, exactly?” Crowley had gone a bit breathless. There was a tension in his voice.

Aziraphale couldn’t look at him in the moment. Not to say what he needs to — no,  _ wants _ to say. What he’s been holding onto for so many years.

So he didn’t. Look at him, that is. Instead he looked somewhere else, anywhere else. Over Crowley’s shoulder, down into his own glass, at his well-manicured nails, anywhere but the demon’s impossible eyes.

“I mean. Us. The both of us. You see, we’ve,” he paused, understood the weight of what he was about to say, “been  _ friends _ for a very long time.”

Crowley had breathed in. Aziraphale had continued on.

“Your friendship is one of the most valuable things I have in my existence. More valuable than this bookshop. More valuable than…than,” he paused, again understanding the weight of things, “than being in Heaven. Or - or, being an angel— “

_ “Aziraphale,” _ Crowley warned him, but the angel held his hand out to cut the demon off.

“Let me finish. What I mean to say is, I’ve been terribly unkind to you over the course of our friendship. I’ve assumed the worst of you, I’ve told you I don’t like you, that we aren’t or never were friends, that things between us were over.”

Crowley breathed in tandem with Aziraphale.

“I’ve been cruel. I’m no better than you just because you are a demon. You’ve shown me kindnesses that no angel ever has, that Heaven never has.” Aziraphale smiled then, remembering a bombed out church.

“My dear boy,” Aziraphale swallowed, pushing down the words he wanted to say. 

If there was ever a time for bravery, which he seems to have in spades these past few days, it was then.

So he found iit, reached in and pulled it out.

Aziraphale lifted his eyes up from his lap, finally looked up at Crowley. His breath in his throat had caught when he saw that they were full of yellow, completely blown wide.

A pause. Then, “Crowley. I… I love you.”

Crowley had nearly choked, his body had heaved forward involuntarily with the motion and he had to set down his empty glass on the desktop. He shook his head, pushed himself upright, and looked to Aziraphale with a sad smile. “Angel, I know. It’s in your nature.”

Aziraphale had to stare at him for a moment to untangle what the meaning of that was. Crowley’s reaction, his sad smile, the words. Aziraphale finally weaved it all together into one clear picture.

The realization caused him to shake his head, let out a soft sight. “No. No, Crowley. I mean yes, it is in my nature I suppose. I don’t love you like an angel loves all living things. I love you because you are Crowley. Because you are my friend. Because…I don’t want to spend another moment in this universe without you by my side. Because,” and before he barrelled headlong into it, he had decided to employ a little bit more bravery because That Was It, so he tossed back his scotch, set the glass on his desk a little too heavily, weaved his fingers together, leaned forward in his chair, and looked up at Crowley with a fierce determination. “I love you like Eve loved Adam, like Adam loved Eve. Do you understand?”

Crowley had stared at him, wide eyed and unblinking, mouth agape.

There was a moment when Aziraphale was sure he had made a miscalculation. That Crowley didn’t feel the same, never had, was just a kinder sort of hellion. A gentler demonic force. But then Crowley’s mouth had spread into a rectangular grimace, followed by a choked out sob. He had fallen back against the leather sofa, covered his eyes with his hands.

Aziraphale, in a panic, had stood suddenly (he can still remember the way his heart had been hammering against his chest.) “Crowley, I-I-I,” he had stammered, hus brain shifting into overdrive as he slotted together a million different ways to Fix It, whatever it was that was happening. “I’m sorry. I. It’s alright if you don’t feel the same! Really!”

He had hovered over Crowley, his hands outstretched in want to help but unsure of what to do, what Crowley had needed of him (in retrospect, that seems to have been the theme of their relationship.)

Crowley laughed through his hands, something that sounded sad to Aziraphale, and a little wet, and that’s when he’d realized the demon was crying.

“Oh… Oh,  _ Crowley.” _

Aziraphale sat down on the sofa near him. Not close enough to touch. It hadn’t felt right to do that yet. But he still held out his hands as if to do something.

“I-I… I don’t know what to do. Tell me what you need.” His voice had gone quiet in the presence of Crowley’s choked sobbing.

Like a gift from God, Crowley had finally lowered his hands from his face. He was slouched into the sofa, halfway on the seat and back. Crowley pushed himself up to sit properly, took a shuddering inhale, and wiped the tears from his face and eyes. When he looked at Aziraphale, his cheeks were flushed and his jaw was clenched, but there was a smile present.

Aziraphale smiled back, something small and unsure and a bit weak. “How…are you…?” He had risked to ask.

Crowley laughed again, a breathy thing that made his shoulders jump and his smile open. “I am… Angel. Aziraphale.  _ Angel _ . I. Have been waiting  _ millenia _ to hear you say those words to me. Ever since that blessed wall. Do you know that? How long I’ve… I’ve. Well.” He averted his gaze then looked back to Aziraphale.

Aziraphale searched Crowley’s face. He could assume the meaning, guess at the implications, but it had been Aziraphale’s experience on Earth that such tactics of communication are often failing.

His hands were being enveloped by smaller, thinner ones. They both guided down to the seat of the sofa.

Crowley swallowed, stared down at their hands. “I. I,” he sighed, closed his eyes, “I love you too, Aziraphale. Like Eve loved Adam. Like Adam loved Eve.”

Something had pulled free from Aziraphale’s chest in that moment. Or was it a weight removed from his shoulders? Or a light uplifting feeling, something like a balloon where he could just float, out-of-body, up through the roof and into the sky?

It was like a punch to the gut.

It was like your first meal after starving.

It was somehow exquisitely painful. 

Aziraphale had wet his lips, looked down at their hands. Hadn’t really see them. He couldn’t quite process what was happening. It didn’t feel real.

“…really?” He whispered.

One, slender finger slid itself under Aziraphale’s chin and gently pushed up. It was Crowley’s, he realized, and he was staring into Crowley’s yellow-shot eyes. The look on the demon’s face was excruciatingly kind and it had pulled some taught thread inside Aziraphale loose, collapsed the careful scaffolding built up around his heart.

Then it was Aziraphale’s turn to choke out a sob. Crowley’s hand moved to cup his cheek, his thumb wiped away a tear.

“Yes, angel. Really,” he had answered.

And there is a sort of reverence to that reply, Aziraphale had heard. A soft, quiet tone that Crowley’s voice had taken on. A current of devotion that had driven it. Low and gravelly. Warm.

Aziraphale rocks back into his chair, realizes that the collar of his shirt is now noticeably damp. Realizes he’s been not just  _ crying, _ but sobbing, silently.

Pathetic, he thinks to himself with a bitter, breathy laugh.

He sweeps a silk handkerchief across his face, under his chin, down his neck. Wonders idly what Crowley’s life looks like now. What he does in his endless time, who he does it with.

The last thought he immediately banishes because it is more painful than everything else combined, and why torture himself? Isn’t it enough to sit on the Amalfi coast by yourself, for the rest of eternity, alone?

There is a cup and saucer on the small table beside him. Rings of tea stain the inside.

Beside it is a mug, the interior encircled by the same track marks.

Across the remaining surfaces of the lanai are more and more drinkware. Tea cups on saucers, tea cups not on saucers, mugs, tea pots. There are abandoned tea bags gone dry in the mediterrenean air.

He turns away from the sea, looks out across this space of his, counts out the cups, the rings that count out the passing minutes, days, months of his new life.

There is a floral one, on a matching saucer, sat on one of the dining chairs. He’d brought that with him from London. Thought a little bit of Old Home might help him settle into New Home.

He remembers a night when the grief had been extraordinary. He had been holding that floral tea cup, staring at the wall, feeling that inescapable feeling of  _ loneliness. _

He could not hear God. Couldn’t really feel the rest of the Heavenly Host. Couldn’t feel, see, hear, talk to, touch, kiss Crowley.

The realization of being utterly and completely alone. It had choked him. Made his body feel like a prison. He looked over at the butcher block and had wondered if he could flay off his skin, escape into the stars, be rid of one giant sphere of reminders.

No. No.

No.

Aziraphale breathed, stared at the tea cup in his hand, thought about smashing it against the wall.

No.

There had been enough destruction to last him forever.

So instead he had filled the cup with tea and had sat on the lanai, under a blanket of stars, and sipped until the horizon took on the telltale shades of a rising sun.

A bird calls out somewhere behind his small house, somewhere up in the trees that rise up on the hilltop. It pulls him back again to the present. To the sun on the water, the breeze that cools him, the wood beneath his slippered feet.

Oh. Right. The tea pot by the door. He’d bought that shortly after he arrived. Clearly a tourist tchotchke, but something so completely different and new that he’d been absolutely charmed by the design of it.

He had felt an immediate compulsion to turn around and show it to Crowley because he knew that he would have teased him mercilessly for it and that they would have laughed about it together.

Ah. There it was again. Memories. Desires. A need. A want.

It was then that Aziraphale truly realized the complexity and majesty of human strength. He’d always cherished humanity, felt protective of them, wanted the best for them. But it wasn’t until  _ all this _ that he’d developed a more nuanced understanding and appreciation for what they persevered through in their short existences.

You see, Aziraphale had come to realize the pain of lost love. And that that pain doesn’t just exist in the physical.

Yes, there is a heartbreak. There is a pain in the chest that feels like a fist, all big and dangerous, but tight and unfurling. It sits there like a rock. Follows you through the day, when you sleep at night, and sometimes it even visits you in your dreams.

Yes, there are the memories. Suddenly they are stored in everything. Your life becomes littered with little mementos, weaved into the most mundane of things that surprise you, turn your entire existence into a minefield. The clothes you wore together, the kind of food you ate, the drinks you shared, the hands you held, the nights you spent together, the feeling of your lips on theirs.

But those are the expected bits. They are the things a little easier to predict, to brace yourself for the impact of. You can at least identify the roadmap of your life, buckle up, and try to take the most meandering path that does the least amount of damage. Avoid the potholes while your heart heals.

The worst part of it is the memories you create apart.

When you see something on the side of the road, or in a store front, or you read something in the paper, and your first instinct is to look over your shoulder and point at said-thing and say, “Look there! How peculiar! I thought you might like it.”

The worst part of it is looking over your shoulder at nothing but empty, stained tea cups.

Aziraphale does that now, ticking down the number of rings. He stares down at his hand, at the signet ring on his pinky. Takes it off, places it next to the tea cup on the table beside him.

He is no angel now. Not in any sort of meaningful way.

He is no one’s angel. Not Heaven’s, not Earth’s, not Crowley’s.

Aziraphale sighs and rests his head back against the chair, rocks in time to the distant sounds of the sea below.

Some days are worse, where the memories don’t stop visiting him. When he watches the same reruns over and over again. Obsesses over them. Fixates.

He supposes he should be a little kinder to himself, in only a few months it would have been the anniversary of their being together. He’s allowed to mourn that he’ll be remembering a different sort of anniversary.

The projector flicks back on again, the film reel rolls, clicking down the time, the months, the moments.

It is late fall. They had decided to move into a cottage by the sea, somewhere in the scenery of the South Downs.

There were the usual negotiations that take place when you live with someone new.

Sure, they’d known each other for millenia, but in the grand scheme of their existence, their meetings had been truly brief and fleeting. A drink here, a meal there, a mutually beneficial exchange of blessings and temptations. They’d shared laughs, many in fact. They’d fallen in love.

Aziraphale had felt there was a certain kind of fate to their love. Something ineffable. Inevitable. This had been part of God’s ineffable plan that they be together. That it would just work. There needn’t be any sort of “trying.”

_ They _ would just work. They had to. What had all this effort been for otherwise?

They negotiated over their shared space in the cottage. They negotiated their use of their own time and each other’s.

In the beginning, things had been grand. Excellent. Perfect. The sun had shown brighter, the weather was never too hot nor too cold.

They had laughed, they had kissed, they had held each other’s hand and made love under the stars, in the garden, in their bed, on the floor, on the sofa, anywhere they could.

They had left little notes for each other.

“Miss you. Thinking about you. Love you. - C”

“Darling, I’m just in the other room. - A”

“I know. Still miss you. Still thinking about you. Still love you. - C”

He’d saved them in an envelope. Got rid of them when he moved. It hurt too much to read them now. Things he desperately wanted to still be true but which were not.

Aziraphale was a tender lover. He could be unbearably kind, until he wasn’t.

“Love, you’re a demon, you do those sorts of things.” He’d said offhand one night, didn’t realize what wound those words had reopened inside Crowley.

When Aziraphale thinks on it all, how things went wrong, he always comes back to that. That one small moment where the lever on the tracks were pulled and they went left instead of right, and there had been no turning back.

Sometimes you can feel these moments. A great cosmic shift. But Aziraphale cannot recall that he had. That he had sensed anything. Any change.

There  _ had _ been a change, though. One that had revealed itself slowly, layer after layer sloughing off to blow away in the sea breeze.

“Please, can you  _ slow down _ Crowley. I know we’re not in London anymore but you could still get us killed.”

“You  _ really _ think I’d endanger our lives? After everything we’ve been through? Really, Aziraphale?”

“With the way you drive, it seems so!”

“…right.”

Crowley had stopped offering to drive Aziraphale anywhere after that. Had started encouraging him to just miracle himself someplace or call a cab. When Aziraphale quizzed him on it, Crowley was cagey, evasive, waved him off as if it was nothing and retreated out to the garden.

It unfolded in that way, a blanket of discontent the shade of choked off communication.

When Crowley had stopped sharing his thoughts, the work he’d done in the garden, where he went on drives to, Aziraphale had approached him.

“Darling, is something wrong? We…don’t seem to talk as much anymore.”

“What’s there to talk about, really? We’re both two immortal beings. You read, I garden. Not much there in common is there.”

“I… I don’t understand. You…you’ve always told me what you do, regardless of if I do it as well. That’s… I… I always want to hear about your day. I want to know what you’re thinking, my dear.”

“Right. Well.”

Aziraphale had rang his hands in the silence. Crowley stared out the window, adjusted his glasses.

A long moment of silence passed. Longer than Aziraphale could ever remember.

“Crowley…? What is… What is…the matter?”

Aziraphale blinks back tears at the memory.

He recalled asking. He recalled the deep, aching pain in his chest when he had. 

He recalled the way that pain had reached up the spine of his neck, gripped at the back of his brain, and sent electric current throughout his body. He’d felt like vomiting.

Aziraphale had felt like vomiting for a long time after.

The remaining moments and weeks and days had all gone by in a flash. Aziraphale would think back upon them fondly, hold tightly onto those happy memories and not regret them but also wonder where he’d gone wrong. What he could have done differently.

Could he have listened more? Been more sensitive? Could he have asked more questions? Could he have put more into the relationship that he wanted to receive?

_ What _ could he have done differently to change their fate?

Aziraphale laughs, a choked and watery thing. The weather is far too bright and pleasant for his melancholy thoughts.

How many months has it been? They’d not even had the chance to celebrate the New Year. And really, what a New Year it would have been.

Aziraphale pushes his too-long nails into the humid wood of his rocking chair and thinks to himself, “Nothing is inevitable except ineffability.”

And cries. Cries for what might have been.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave your comments! I'd love to know if this resonated with or brought any comfort, catharsis, relief, or whatever for anyone. I was working through some things of my own but also wanted this piece to be there for other people too.
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at noxiraphale. Come talk to me!


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